Keras has provided more than $2.5 million to support and elevate founders in our communities.

One of the alums of the Koress Dream Fund, Na'IBE Renoso, is an Emmy award-winning journalist

and the founder of Contodo Press.

Na'IBE shares who she applied her journalism skills to entrepreneurship, the realities of publishing,

and how to find big money for your big idea. Big Idea.

Naebe, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Alicia.

I love a fellow journal who has made a pivot. My favorite genre of guest. Nae, some people are storytellers by nature and some by nurture, some both.

How did you become a storyteller? I think by nature, ever since I was little, I was creating stories in my head.

I think what really helped is that I moved to Mexico or our family did when I was seven years

old.

And it really allowed magical thinking.

We lived in a little ranch with cows and horses and goats and chickens.

And it just really expanded that ability for me to look at this farm and just create different

stories in my head. And ever since then, I've been telling stories and I've been writing stories.

The original form of storytelling really

comes as a journalist. Can you take me back to the moment when you thought to yourself,

I want to continue to tell stories, but I want to do it in a different way. I'm still a journalist.

I still work doing stories for L.A. County. But yeah, I've always liked to seek out those hidden stories, especially about my community. In my entire career, I've been doing this for 30 years. But once I really became a mom and I realized that there was this need to tell stories for a different audience because the audience I was telling stories for were for TV news consumers, right?

But I never really thought of what about children? What stories are they listening to? What stories are they reading? What stories are they hearing? Media is so powerful,

right? The messages that we hear, the messages that are out there influence us, influence a lot of

times society and culture as a whole and individuals. And I just felt like I really want to

...